If I understand you correctly, you appear to be making the argument that if we kick certain groups off the public communications fora, they will meet in secret and become an unseen force that overthrows society.
Even if that's true, I don't think you've made the case that allowing them room in the newspapers to coordinate doesn't just give them the opportunity to amass like-minded supporters and overthrow society faster. Forcing the opinions of fringe groups into privately owned newspapers, for example, gives them an air of legitimacy that they don't have if the same information is printed on self-published pamphlets that they're handing out on a street corner.
You are also claiming that you are arguing concrete scenarios and I'm arguing abstractions. I'm unaware of any government overthrows that occurred because some people were unable to use the internet due to their past use of it being so heinous that nobody wants to do business with them, and I'm pretty sure it hasn't happened; internet is too young.
>You are also claiming that you are arguing concrete scenarios and I'm arguing abstractions. I'm unaware of any government overthrows that occurred because some people were unable to use the internet due to their past use of it being so heinous that nobody wants to do business with them, and I'm pretty sure it hasn't happened; internet is too young.
I gave you are very direct example for a totalitarian echo chamber becoming murderous. The Soviet and Chinese famines. The officially dictated story became beyond critic and millions died as a result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
I also mentioned Dallaires pleas to the UN for access to radio equipment to be allowed to air a counter narrative to the genocidal government aligned ones. Something he addressed special weight to in his "Shaking hands with the devil". Which should say a lot about its importance.
>If I understand you correctly, you appear to be making the argument that if we kick certain groups off the public communications fora, they will meet in secret and become an unseen force that overthrows society.
No, quite the opposite. Trying to ban people you dont like from communicating will result in a totalitarian echo chamber. Thats a slope and you willfully ignore the need for breaks. That quickly turns murderous. Because determining what should and shouldnt be censored and its second and third order effects is an infinitely complex problem that you cant address with intention alone. And will quickly be exploited for monetary/ personal / political / tribal profit. Trying to control discourse is a slope and by making self hosting impossible you are destroying the possibility to erect warning lights. You are willfully heading for a cliff.
Your error stems from being focused on the who of the story and at the same time ignoring practical limits. I am telling you if you are at the point in which communication is restricted enough, there will soon bee armed men and horror if your only safeguards are good intentions. There is a causal relationship, power becomes uncontrollable and slip from your hands as the official story and reality collide more and more and you become incapacitated by it. You trying to solve this with feeling competent enough and more armed men / state control is how that always works. Those are usually the same people who drag you off into camps. After all, you ignored safe use in favor of feeling good about the story and somebody like Stalin or Hitler doesnt mind taking over. The German justice system is a great example, many judges just continued to do their job with their career spanning Weimar, the third Reich and West/East Germany.
Even if you are delusional enough to think that your totalitarian echochamber will be the first one able to overrule reality, people will reliably react and that reaction being unguided as well can easily turn fascist. It was already visible with the various stay behind organizations throughout Europe that were intended as a safeguard against a totalitarian power grab. Or with the KPD as a major topic for NSDAP election run up. Caricatures and bogeymen pose the threat of becoming the lesser evil if the situation deteriorates enough. This isnt a matter of tribalism but one of guaranteed conflict and atrocities. There is no acceptable or safe version of totalitarianism, its by its very nature corrupt, self destructive and brings out the worst in people. Even if "your side" ends up on top, it will be a distorted, corrupt and dysfunctional monster. Or do you think there are many fans of Göring even among Nazis? Large parts of the admiralty of the soviet pacific fleet dying in an overloaded smuggler plane is another good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Pushkin_Tu-104_crash
I think we disagree on the totalitarian aspect of the echo chamber. I agree with you that letting companies have freedom to peer encourages echo chambers. For them to become totalitarian, it'd have to be power flowing from the government. The status quo is that individual companies may choose their digital neighbors. That creates echo chambers but not ones that can hook the levers of power. It enhances tribalism, not totalitarianism.
Coupled with a healthy democracy, it if anything makes it harder for a zeitgeist opinion to become entrenched permanently in leadership when the nation's thought is composed of separate tribal opinions.
The EFF is advocating government saying who must and may not peer. Currently, corporations may say. The status quo is diffusion of power, not concentration.
>I think we disagree on the totalitarian aspect of the echo chamber.
That distinction you hope for does not exist. We arent talking about your frame of digital neighbors but an end to self hosting. How ever nice your story sounds isnt more important then its predictable consequences.
Authoritarian means with righteous sounding justifications safeguarded by only good intentions and an assumption of competence arent safeguards against totalitarianism, its its description. You cant create an authoritarian entity where you just keep the mean people away from the wheel. Thats how almost all totalitarians describe their perspective, including when some of my older relatives can be believed my great grand parents with NSDAP membership cards. You are making the exact same argument. By insisting on how competent, well intentioned and justified you are, you verifying this assumption. You acknowledge that you are unable to recognize that that isnt enough. Which means less and less people are going to tell you this. Because its really dangerous, on an individual and a societal level.https://sproutsschools.com/bonhoeffers-theory-of-stupidity/
When the acoustic breaks are gone the kinetic ones will need to be engaged. Thats not a bug, they have to, there is genocide and existential risk waiting at the bottom of the slope and you dont have the ability, let alone intention, to break yourself. Which is really bad as its a very safe indicator that stuff is soon to become horrific. With anyone who tried the acoustic breaks unable to engage the kinetic ones. Which means fewer and fewer will even try communicating this. We cant allow that to happen. There is no way totalitarianism isnt going to end horribly. If we loose the ability to communicate we are collectively done for.
The only thing your intention influences here is your feelings about yourself. Which when coupled with an echo chamber gets you the typical righteous totalitarian fever that allows ignoring the costs and risks in favor of the nicely painted frame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
Please listen to the panicky sounding German, what ever you think you are trying to do here, do it without destroying the acoustic breaks. You not liking the sound they make doesnt mean we can do without them.
You're using a lot of words to make a slippery slope argument. It requires a lot more defense than your providing. From my point of view, the slope if anything points in the other direction.
What you are arguing for leads to totalitarianism. Here's how:
* We decide as a society that private peering decisions are unacceptable and the government must regulate them. It starts innocent enough; we pass a law that says if you try to de-peer for reasons of your corporate policy were no law was broken, as is the case here, you can't.
* In so doing, we've now opened the floodgates on government, not private corporations and organizations, controlling the shape of the internet
* A subsequent government comes along and, since they already have the authority to regulate peering, passes the law that you must de-peer from sites that encourage cyberbullying. Nobody bats an eye because the government already regulates peering. The key difference here is that since this is now government policy not the policy of a private institution, citizens don't have somewhere else to turn; KF can't find a new host. Their speech has been actually criminalized.
Now we are on the slope with no breaks. Subsequent governments pass laws that you have to de-peer from sites that tolerate racism. The tolerate discussion of self-harm. That tolerate criticism of public health policy. That tolerate criticism of public policy in general. That tolerate criticism of the government. That tolerate criticism of politicians. And now all the gunpowder is piled in the corner waiting for a match.
The power to force a shape to the network is a double edged sword, and I trust it far more in the hands of private actors than in the hands of the government. Even if, in the hands of private actors, It can lead to tribalism and balkanization of the network. Forcing people to carry a message they don't agree with is every bit as totalitarian as forcing people into silence.
Forcing people to peer and forcing people not to peer are as fundamentally different as the bill of rights and the death penalty. One keeps communication channels open, the other closes them.
I choose what you frame as might lead to totalitarianism over being in totalitarianism any day of the week. The moment it becomes practically impossible to self host you are very likely to be on the slope with no way to tell how much further till mass graves. That likely will be the case if Josh ends up at the point at which Kiwifarms cant be turned back on again. Thats why people reference them as a canary. They are among the first that you can expect the wave to hit. With no way to tell up front how the wave is going to look this time around.
Communication channels cant be closed. If this form of mob controlled free-market censorship (or any form ) is here to stay much much harder to censor means of communication will start popping up to keep the kinetic breaks from engaging. Which will get a lot more disgusting then kiwifarms due to tribalistic reactions and people weaponizing the moderation burden, which will speed up the conflict cycle and the race to the bottom even more. Its still not optional. Thats what i meant when i said reactions quickly turn fascist. Making sure that it doesnt is an almost impossible task if you are far enough down the cycle.
The more we even need to talk about this, the more dangerous it becomes. What ever you are doing or trying to do, cutting communication channels can not be the likely outcome.
Not as fundamentally different as you want them to be. They're both saying "This is something the government has authority over, not individuals."
And once that authority is vested in the government, the government shall use it as those in control of the government deem fit. I trust a world where HE can misbehave but there's always another service provider down the pike a lot more than I trust one where the government's dictating who may be compelled to peer; the government, given enough time, always rolls around to being composed of people who de-peer me. Or you. And when they're calling the shots, there isn't a HE competitor down the pipe to turn to.
You keep saying "impossible to host." It's not. KF can still host; they must continue to seek out the coalition of providers that will work with them, the subset of the collective network willing to hear them. It's a big world and they're out there. But it's a vanishingly small group for no other reason than what KiwiFarms does and what they represent. Sometimes, people are all in agreement that something's wrong because it is.
> If this form of mob controlled free-market censorship (or any form ) is here to stay much much harder to censor means of communication will start popping up to keep the kinetic breaks from engaging
That's hardly an argument against the status quo; better point-to-point security benefits the people against oppressive governments. If this provides incentive to build it, good.
> What ever you are doing or trying to do, cutting communication channels can not be the likely outcome.
I used to subscribe to this fallacy. It turns out, cutting communication can be extremely healthy. The government owes everyone a platform for practical reasons. Individuals? They cut ties all the time. Always have. Sometimes someone just sucks, y'know?
For what its worth, i do sympathize with your perspective. And yes, in a perfect world we wouldnt want the government anywhere near this.
The problem is that we now are at the point at which it becomes a practical end to self hosting. Not because everyone is convinced and one of the good guys now but because the power structure that is in place. That dissonance to your intention is where the risk comes from and what i am trying to warn you about. You are describing a mechanism of making communication impossible through applying pressure.
Thats less my object of concern then your willingness to overlook the risks doing this poses by focusing on intention over outcome . While tbh i do take offense to attempting the first, the later is where the giant danger is at. You are doing something that fits the definition of totalitarianism and with it you are faced with its risks. Not safeguarding against them means its extremely improbable that you end anywhere but in a dysfunction nightmare. Which means that weapon able to end self hosting will get into the wrong hands reliably which has good chances result in a quite horrific echo chamber. Which in all likelihood means i will be able to use the downtime between work through extermination sessions in the reeducation camp to argue that being sorry unfortunately has similar impact on reality as the initial good intention. But maybe we can then figure out how we prevent yet another repeat after the new regime hopefully burned itself to the ground.
I am hard pressed to not compare the whole situation to an overconfident and careless cave diver getting lost predictably. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRarNBAG6HY The idiot is fine, but the nature of the way we interact with the world means we get less and less direct feedback from the dysfunctional paths people take. After all, they are quite the downer. Which results in a drastic underestimation of the risks some aspects of reality pose.
> If this provides incentive to build it, good.
Leaving out the very obvious risk of it not being feasible, few people are willing to overlook the risk of creating something that has the potential to create quite a horrific future and very direct and individual harm. As well as the very predictable reactions. The only promise accelerationism can make is misery. Unguided reactions are not a viable plan and failures arent predictable or necessarily timely. That might be the path towards a proper dystopia.
Either way, its still further escalation in a tribalistic struggle that brings out the worst in people. I dont want to end up in an extreme and disfigured opposition to a caricature. This is just stupid.
>Sometimes someone just sucks, y'know?
You are free to do so already. And a bit off topic, good decision for your mental health. But this isnt about the value that person offers but your ability to communicate vanishing completely. Picture finding a manual reading "To easily revert from catastrophic failure ■■■■■■■■■". That very likely happened to some apparatchik with a case of emergency contact never having existed after the last purge. The second and third order effects always bite you. And the utterly horrific stuff that can happen when a powerful apparatus capsules human misery and censors the reports about it can be seen in stuff like the soviet cannibal island. Or any other big atrocity throughout time.
In the end even feudal kings had jesters around to not drift off into a parallel reality. Reality isnt less important then peace of mind. Willfully ignoring this is really hard to frame as good intentioned.
the "weapon able to end self hosting" in this context is "everyone with access to a backbone decides your content shouldn't be part of the larger Internet."
Everyone. That's a huge group.
The easiest way to test your hypothesis that this scenario leads to totalitarianism is to check if KF is still reachable right now. And... Yes, yes it is, via tor. HE chose not to work with them but they're only one corporation. KF has allies. And the government can't force it offline because the choice to peer / provide service or not is a per-company choice in this dimension, not a government regulation.
Contrast with your proposed scenario, where we hand the government the right to regulate peering and, two government changes-of-hands later, KF (and various other services) are forced off with the teeth of legal enforcement behind it. If the government starts sending company owners to jail for hosting KF, how many fewer potential peering partners will be out there to support them? And not just them, but whoever that government deems unworthy?
You're arguing for government control over personal / corporation control and somehow claiming the alternative is totalitarianism. I disagree, and I don't think we're going to come to terms. So I'm taking this opportunity to exercise my own liberty to end this conversation.
Even if that's true, I don't think you've made the case that allowing them room in the newspapers to coordinate doesn't just give them the opportunity to amass like-minded supporters and overthrow society faster. Forcing the opinions of fringe groups into privately owned newspapers, for example, gives them an air of legitimacy that they don't have if the same information is printed on self-published pamphlets that they're handing out on a street corner.
You are also claiming that you are arguing concrete scenarios and I'm arguing abstractions. I'm unaware of any government overthrows that occurred because some people were unable to use the internet due to their past use of it being so heinous that nobody wants to do business with them, and I'm pretty sure it hasn't happened; internet is too young.